Or, how I read parts of the fine manual.
Yesterday, after spending way too much time trying to get find(1) to exclude vim swapfiles, I finally had it with them cluttering up my work directories. As is usually the case when vim triggers an itch, I thought, “there must be a setting for that,” and lo, there was.
set directory=~/.vimswap//
Make that directory and all the swap files go there instead. The trailing double slashes mean the swap files get named in such a way as to avoid conflicts.
Here are some other things added to my vimrc over the last year or so.
Show whitespace issues as spelling mistakes:
match SpellBad /s+$| +zet/
I used to always set my windows to 80 columns, but then I started using ‘set number’ and then all of that went out the window, so to speak. So now I do this to show where wrapping needs to happen:
set colorcolumn=80
This hack is kind of neat, it shows +/- change markers on the edge, based on git changes in your working copy:
https://github.com/airblade/vim-gitgutter
(To make it less intrusive, I added highlight clear SignColumn.)
Once upon a time, I had a really complicated macro to search up the directory hierarchy looking for tags files. It turns out vim already does that if you add a semicolon in there (:help file-searching):
set tags=./tags;